Simply defined (and the simpler the better for our purposes), the death camps were
constructed to fulfi1l one purpose: to kill the greatest number of Jews at the least
possible cost in money and material.

Emil L. Fackenheim

The Auschwitz praxis was based on a new principle: for one portion of mankind, existence
itself is a crime, punishable by humiliation, torture, and death. And the new world
produced by this praxis included two kinds of inhabitants, those who were given the
"punishment" and those who administered it.

Emil L. Fackenheim

The characteristic Nazi criminal was rather a dime-a-dozen individual, who, having once
been an ordinary, nay, respected citizen, committed at Auschwitz crimes of a kind and on a
scale hitherto unimaginable, only to become, when it was over, an ordinary citizen again,
without signs of suffering sleepless nights. Eichmann was only one such person. Others are
still being discovered in nice suburbs, and their neighbors testify how they took care of
their gardens and were kind to their dogs. Himmler himself, had he escaped detection and
the need for suicide, might well have returned to his chicken farm. The philosopher in
Arendt looked for some depth in such as these, and found none. It was "banal"
people who committed what may justly be called the greatest crime in history; and it was
the system that made them do what they did.

from "The Holocaust and Philosophy," Journal of Philosophy (1985)

Emil L. Fackenheim

Philosophy has all along been acquainted with the quasi-evil of sadism (a mere
sickness), the semievil of moral weakness, the superficial evil of ignorance, and
evenhardest to understand and, therefore often ignored or deniedthe radical or
demonic evil that is done and celebrated for its own sake. Prior to the Holocaust,
however, it was unacquainted with the "banality of evil" practiced by numberless
individuals who, having been ordinary or even respected citizens, committed at Auschwitz
crimes on a scale previously unimaginable, only to become, in the Holocaust's aftermath,
ordinary and respectable once morewithout showing signs of any moral anguish.

Primo Levi

Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his
house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow
man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses
all often easily loses himself. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly
decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of a
pure judgment of utility. It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of
the term "extermination camp," and it is now clear what we seek to express with
the phrase: "to lie on the bottom."

Saul Friedlander

When the "Final Solution" was implemented, metaphorically speaking, an
apocalyptic dimension entered history, took place within history. In some remote areas of
eastern Europe, the total annihilation of millions of human beings was being
systematically implemented. But for those who were not the victims, life went on, during
the events and after them: the apocalypse had passed by unnoticed. We are confronted with
an "end" that happened, that was entirely consummated for millions of human
beings, but which surrounding society hardly perceived, possibly did not want to perceive
at all. Life continuedand continuesits normal flow.

The total dissonance between the apocalypse that was and the normality that is
makes adequate representation elusive, because the human imagination stumbles when faced
with the fundamental contradiction of apocalypse within normality.

from Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Indiana UP,
1993)

Arthur Cohen

If the reality is inconceivable, if we cannot encompass the decision of one people to
congregate and destroy another, attended by the complicity and inattention of all the rest
of mankind, equally inconceivable is any language of compensation or heroic
transfiguration.

Elie Wiesel

At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man. To live in a world where
there is nothing anymore, where the executioner acts as god, as judgemany wanted no
part of it. It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz.

Arthur Cohen

. . . One must live with the tremendum, and living with it requires that it be
perceived accurately (to the extent that accuracy is possible about events as charged as
these), clearly (to the extent that looking into the charnel house can ever be unclouded
and precise), and distinctly (to the extent that it can be confronted as a constellated
phenomenon which both does and does not indict all of Western civilized history, all of
Christianity, all of silent humanity, and most of all, the history and faith of Israel).
There was a time when it was understandable that one's reaction to the asking of the
meaning of the tremendum was the fervid wish that it had none, that it implicated
nothing beyond itself, that it described an historical horror, but that it did not tear
apart the fabric of the larger universe where men create, make art, think, love, ransoming
the human from the mud and muck of the concrete and particular. That time is past.

Hannah Arendt

There are no parallels to the life of the concentration camps. All seeming parallels
create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons
and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful
comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.

Primo Levi

. . . for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this
offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the
reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower
than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so.
Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair;
if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand.
They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find in
ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of
us, of us as we were, still remains.

Hannah Arendt

The horror of the concentration and extermination camps can never be fully embraced by
the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death. The inmates
are more effectively cut off from the world of the living than if they were dead, because
terror compels oblivion among those who know them or love them. "What extraordinary
women you are here," exclaimed the Soviet police when Polish women insisted on
knowing the whereabouts of their husbands who had disappeared. "In our country, when
the husband is arrested; the wife sues for divorce and looks for another man" (The
Dark Side of the Moon). Murder in the camps is as impersonal as the squashing
of a gnat, a mere technique of management, as when a camp is overcrowded and is
liquidatedor an accidental by-product, as when a prisoner succumbs to torture.
Systematic torture and systematic starvation create an atmosphere of permanent dying, in
which death as well as life is effectively obstructed.

The fear of the absolute Evil which permits of no escape knows that this is the end of
dialectical evolutions and developments. It knows that modem politics revolves around a
question which, strictly speaking, should never enter into politics, the question of all
or nothing: of all, that is, a human society rich with infinite possibilities; or exactly
nothing, that is, the end of mankind.

from "The Concentration Camps," Partisan Reviews (1948)

Michael L. Morgan

Modernity has meant various things to us. We associate it with the modern
worldits social and political developments, its secularization, industrialization,
bureaucratization, rationalization, and more. We also associate it with the Enlightenment
themes of freedom and rationality, the emergence of political forms and societies built on
respect for all human beings, for their freedom and self-determination, their equality,
and the respect due all people as human beings with common and fundamental rights. . . .
What do the death camps tell us about our Enlightenment conception of human nature, about
modern society and culture, and about the modern social sciences?

from A Holocaust Reader (Oxford UP, 2001)

Elie Wiesel

In truth, Auschwitz signifies not only the failure of two thousand years of Christian
civilization, but also the defeat of the intellect that wants to find a Meaningwith
a capital Min history. What Auschwitz embodied has none. The executioner killed for
nothing, the victim died for nothing. No God ordered the one to prepare the stake, nor the
other to mount it. During the Middle Ages, the Jews, when they chose death, were convinced
that by their sacrifice they were glorifying and sanctifying God's name. At Auschwitz the
sacrifices were without point, without faith, without divine inspiration. If the suffering
of one human being has any meaning, that of six million has none. Numbers have their own
importance; they prove, according to Piotr Rawicz, that God has gone mad.

from "A Plea for the Dead"

Emil L. Fackenheim

The most obvious recent precedent of the Holocaust is the Turkish genocide of the
Armenians in World War I. Like the Nazi genocide of the Jews in World War II, this was an
attempt to destroy a whole people, carried out under the cover of a war with maximum
secrecy, and with the victims being deported to isolated places prior to their murder, all
of which provoked few countermeasures or even verbal protests on the part of the civilized
world. Doubtless the Nazis both learned from, and were encouraged by, the Armenian
precedent.

But unlike the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust was intended, planned, and executed as
the "final solution" of a "problem." Thus, whereas, for example, the
roundup of Armenians in Istanbul, the very heart of the Turkish empire, was discontinued
after a while, Nazi Germany, had it won the war or even managed to prolong it, would have
succeeded in murdering every Jew. North American Indians have survived in reservations;
Jewish reservations in a victorious Nazi empire are inconceivable. Thus the Holocaust may
be said to belong, with other catastrophes, to the species genocide. Within the
species, defined as intended, planned, and largely executed extermination, it is without
precedent and, thus far at least, without sequel. It ishere the term really must be
employedunique.

Jean Améry

Tobe a Jew, that meant for me, from this moment on, to be a dead man on leave,
someone to be murdered, who only by chance was not yet where he properly belonged; and so
it has remained, in many variations, in various degrees of intensity, until today. The
death threat, which I felt for the first time with complete clarity while reading the
Nuremberg Laws, included what is commonly referred to as the methodic
"degradation" of the Jews by the Nazis. Formulated differently: the denial of
human dignity sounded the death threat. Daily, for years on end, we could read and hear
that we were lazy, evil, ugly, capable only of misdeed, clever only to the extent that we
pulled one over on others. We were incapable of founding a state, but also by no means
suited to assimilate with our host nations. By their very presence, our bodieshairy,
fat, and bowleggedbefouled public swimming pools, yes, even park benches. Our
hideous faces, depraved and spoilt by protruding ears and hanging noses, were disgusting
to our fellow men, fellow citizens of yesterday. We were not worthy of love and thus also
not of life. Our sole right, our sole duty was to disappear from the face of the earth.

from At the Mind's Limits (Indiana UP, 1980)

Primo Levi

We do not believe in the most obvious and facile deduction: that man is fundamentally
brutal, egoistic and stupid in his conduct once every civilized institution is taken away,
and that the Haftling is consequently nothing but a man without inhibitions. We believe,
rather, that the only conclusion to be drawn is that in the face of driving necessity and
physical disabilities many social habits and instincts are reduced to silence.

But another fact seems to us worthy of attention: there comes to light the existence of
two particularly well differentiated categories among menthe saved and the drowned.
Other pairs of opposites (the good and the bad, the wise and the foolish, the cowards and
the courageous, the unlucky and the fortunate) are considerably less distinct, they seem
less essential, and above all they allow for more numerous and complex intermediary
gradations.

This division is much less evident in ordinary life; for there it rarely happens that a
man loses himself. A man is normally not alone, and in his rise or fall is tied to the
destinies of his neighbours; so that it is exceptional for anyone to acquire unlimited
power, or to fall by a succession of defeats into utter ruin. Moreover, everyone is
normally in possession of such spiritual, physical and even financial resources that the
probabilities of a shipwreck, of total inadequacy in the face of life, are relatively
small. And one must take into account a definite cushioning effect exercised both by the
law, and by the moral sense which constitutes a self-imposed law; for a country is
considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak
man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.

But in the Lager things are different: here the struggle to survive is without respite,
because everyone is desperately and ferociously alone. Ifsome Null Achtzehn
vacillates, he will find no one to extend a helping hand; on the contrary, someone will
knock him aside, because it is in no one's interest that there be one more
"mussulman" dragging himself to work every day; and if someone, by a miracle of
savage patience and cunning, finds a new method of avoiding the hardest work, a new art
which yields him an ounce of bread, he will try to keep his method secret, and he will be
esteemed and respected for this, and will derive from it an exclusive, personal benefit;
he will become stronger and so will be feared, and who is feared is, ipso facto, a
candidate for survival. . . .

. . . With the adaptable, the strong and astute individuals, even the leaders willingly
keep contact, sometimes even friendly contact, because they hope later to perhaps derive
some benefit. But with the mussulmans, the men in decay, it is not even worth speaking,
because one knows already that they will complain and will speak about what they used to
eat at home. Even less worthwhile is it to make friends with them, because they have no
distinguished acquaintances in camp, they do not gain any extra rations, they do not work
in profitable Kommandos and they know no secret method of organizing. And in any case, one
knows that they are only here on a visit, that in a few weeks nothing will remain of them
but a handful of ashes in some near-by field and a crossed-out number on a register.
Although engulfed and swept along without rest by the innumerable crowd of those similar
to them, they suffer and drag themselves along in an opaque intimate solitude, and in
solitude they die or disappear, without leaving a trace in anyones memory. . . .

To sink is the easiest of matters; it is enough to carry out all the orders one
receives, to eat only the ration, to observe the discipline of the work and the camp.
Experience showed that only exceptionally could one survive more than three months in this
way. All the mussulmans who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more
exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run
down to the sea. On their entry into the camp, through basic incapacity, or by misfortune,
or through some banal incident, they are overcome before they can adapt themselves; they
are beaten by time, they do not begin to learn German, to disentangle the infernal knot of
laws and prohibitions until their body is already in decay, and nothing can save them from
selections or from death by exhaustion. Their life is short, but their number is endless;
they, the Muselmanner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous
mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in
silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One
hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of
which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.

They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil
of our time in our image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated
man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace
of a thought is to be seen.

The incredibility of the horrors is closely bound up with their economic uselessness.
The Nazis carried this uselessness to the point of open antiutility when in the midst of
the war, despite the shortage of rolling stock, they transported millions of Jews to the
east and set up enormous, costly extermination factories. In the midst of a strictly
utilitarian world the obvious contradiction between these acts and military expediency
gave the whole enterprise an air of mad unreality.

However, such unreality, created by an apparent lack of purpose, is the very basis of
all forms of concentration camp. Seen from outside, they and the things that happen in
them can be described only in images drawn from a life after death, that is, a life
removed from earthly purposes. Concentration camps can very aptly be divided into three
types corresponding to three basic Western conceptions of a life after death: Hades,
purgatory, and hell. To Hades correspond those relatively mild forms, once popular even in
nontotalitarian countries, for getting undesirable elements of all sortsrefugees,
stateless persons, the asocial and the unemployedout of the way; as DP camps, which
are nothing other than camps for persons who have become superfluous and bothersome, they
have survived the war. Purgatory is represented by the Soviet Union's labor camps, where
neglect is combined with chaotic forced labor. Hell in the most literal sense was embodied
by those types of camp perfected by the Nazis, in which the whole of life was thoroughly
and systematically organized with a view to the greatest possible torment.

All three types have one thing in common: the human masses sealed off in them are
treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of any
interest to anybody, as if they were already dead and some evil spirit gone mad were
amusing himself by stopping them for a while between life and death before admitting them
to eternal peace.

from "The Concentration Camps," Partisan Review (1948)

Arthur A. Cohen

There is something in the nature of thought which is alien to the enormity of the death
camps. There is something no less incommensurable in the reality of the death camps which
repudiates the attentions of thought. Thinking and the death camps are opposed. The
procedures of thought and the ways of knowing are confounded. It is to think the
unthinkable, which is not alone contradictory but hopeless, for thought entails as much a
moral hope (that it may be triumphant, mastering its object, dissolving the difficulties,
containing and elucidating the conundrum) as it is the investment of skill and dispassion
in a methodic procedure. The death camps are a reality which, by their very nature,
obliterate thought and the humane program of thinking. We are dealing, at the very outset,
therefore, with something unmanageable and obduratea reality which exists, which is
historically documented, which has specific beginnings and ends, located in time, the
juncture of confluent influences which run from the beginnings of historical memory to a
moment of consummating orgy, never to be forgotten, but difficult to remember, a
continuous scourge to memory and the future of memory and yet something which, whenever
addressed, collapses into tears, passion, rage. The death camps are unthinkable, but not
unfelt. They constitute a traumatic event, and like all decisive trauma, they are
suppressed but omnipresent; unrecognized but tyrannic; silted over by forgetfulness, but
never obliterated; rising like a shade in dreams, allusions, the imagination to plague
consciousness without end.

In this our own time, one asks again and again: How is a Jewish life still possible
after Auschwitz? I would like to frame this question more correctly: how is a life with
God still possible in a time in which there is an Auschwitz? The estrangement has become
too cruel, the hiddenness too deep. One can still "believe" in the God who
allowed those things to happen, but can one still speak to Him? Can one still hear His
word? Can one still, as an individual and as a people, enter at all into a dialogic
relationship with Him? Can one still call to Him? Dare we recommend to the survivors of
Auschwitz, the Job of the gas chambers: "Give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good;
for His mercy endureth forever"?

from "The Dialogue between Heaven and Earth," On Judaism (Shocken
Books, 1967)

Johann Baptist Metz

Faced with Auschwitz, I consider as blasphemy every Christian theodicy (i.e., every
attempt at a so-called "justification of God") and all language about
"meaning" when these are initiated outside this catastrophe or on some level
above it. Meaning, even divine meaning, can be invoked by us only to the extent that such
meaning was not also abandoned in Auschwitz itself. But this means that we Christians for
our very own sakes are from now on assigned to the victims of Auschwitzassigned, in
fact, in an alliance belonging to the heart of saving history, provided the word
"history" in this Christian expression is to have a definite meaning and not
just serve as a screen for a triumphalist metaphysic of salvation which never learns from
catastrophes nor finds in them a cause for conversion, since in its view such catastrophes
of meaning do not in fact exist at all.

. . . How can we simply stand by and continue optimistic theologies of the world when
we recall that our Western humanist world either collapsed in the face of that vile
destruction of all traditional Greek, Latin, and German humanist cultural values and
traditions or else stood by and did little or nothing to stop the horror? How can we stand
by and continue to develop theologies of the church and the tradition as if the Holocaust
did not happen? How can we do so, as Christians, when we recall that the Christian
churches, both Protestant and Catholic, stood by, watched, and did little or nothing to
stop the tremendum. That individual Christians and individual humanists heard that
call and acted, suffered, and died can give the rest of us some heart that the ideals of
those traditions did live even then. But that the official churches or whole groups of
church congregations did little or nothing in the face of that reality is a fact which
commands profound religious repentance and demands genuine theological response.

To confront Auschwitz is in no way to comprehend it. Anyone wishing to comprehend in
this area will have comprehended nothing. As it gazes toward us incomprehensibly out of
our most recent history, it eludes our every attempt at some kind of amicable
reconciliation which would allow us to dismiss it from our consciousness. The only thing
"objective" about Auschwitz are the victims,the mourners, and those who
do penance. Faced with Auschwitz, there can be no abstention, no inability to relate. To
attempt such a thing would be yet another case of secret complicity with the unfathomed
horror. Yet how are we Christians to come to terms with Auschwitz? We will in any case
forgo the temptation to interpret the suffering of the Jewish people from our standpoint,
in terms of saving history. Under no circumstances is it our task to mystify this
suffering! We encounter in this suffering first of all only the riddle of our own
lack of feeling, the mystery of our own apathy, not, however, the traces of God.

Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture
and barbarism. To write poetry after the holocaust is barbaric. And this corrodes even the
knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification,
which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb
the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it
confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.

. . . in the concentration camps it was no longer an individual who died, but a
specimenthis is a fact bound to affect the dying of those who escaped the
administrative measure.

Genocide is the absolute integration. It is on its way wherever men are leveled
off"polished off," as the German military called ituntil one
exterminates them 1iterally, as deviations from the concept of their total nullity.
Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death. The most far out dictum
from Beckett's End Game,that there really is not so much to be feared any
more, reacts to a practice whose first sample was given in the concentration camps, and in
whose conceptvenerable once upon a timethe destruction of nonidentity is
ideologically lurking. Absolute negativity is in plain sight and has ceased to surprise
anyone. Fear used to be tied to the principium individuationis of
se1f-preservation, and that principle, by its own consistency, abolishes itself. What the
sadists in the camps foretold their victims, "Tomorrow you'll be wiggling skyward as
smoke from this chimney," bespeaks the indifference of each individual life that is
the direction of history. Even in his formal freedom, the individual is as fungible and
replaceable as he will be under the liquidators' boots.

But since, in a world whose law is universal individual profit, the individual has
nothing but this self that has become indifferent, the performance of the old, familiar
tendency is at the same time the most dreadful of things. There is no getting out of this,
no more than out of the electrified barbed wire around the camps. Perennial suffering has
as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong
to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise
the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on livingespecially
whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on
living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois
subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt
of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is
no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence
since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years
earlier.

Michael L. Morgan

. . . What role does historiography play in the way a society and culture
"remembers" past events? Does the historian have a moral or civic responsibility
to this project of memory that ought to influence the way he or she engages in historical
practice? Should moral concerns influence the historians choice of subject matter,
of issues to discuss, of evidence to use?

Omer Bartov

The argument on the unrepresentability of the Holocaust was voiced in conjunction with
one of the greatest single poems of the century. When Adorno asserted that poetry after
Auschwitz was barbarism, the poem he appears to have had in mind was Paul Celan's Todesfuge.
Perhaps only those who have heard Celan reading this poem aloud can perceive the
extent to which its relentless rhythm and stark imagery seem to recapture the whole
experience of the death camp, the crazy logic of the extermination, the horrifying irony
of installing the "chosen people" as smoke in the sky, this insane world of
music and bloodhounds, of beauty and ashes, of total, endless, unremitting despair.

And yet Celan himself seems to have found his poem too coherent, too
"poetic," too musical; it was taught in German schools as a good example of a
poetic fugue; it was set to music; it did not, for him, recapture the essence of the
unimaginable industrial annihilation, without any traces, of millions. It is therefore his
later poem, Engfuhrung that wholly dispenses with any imagery, rhythm, balance, but
is as disjointed, disoriented, verbally crippled, emotionally inexpressible as the
memories of the survivors. It is a cry of pain, despair, boundless sorrow, which must
remain mute because it is confronted with the wasteland of ashes and an indifferent world.
Listening to Celan read this poem in Jerusalem, just a year before his suicide, one cannot
forget the broken voice repeating "Asche, Asche Asche," for here one confronts
not a surfeit of memory, not even a limit of representation, but the despair of not being
able to remember, of trying to hold onto remnants of words spoken long ago, objects
touched, feelings aroused, and yet constantly returning to the ashes. A world destroyed,
turned into ashes, can never suffer from too much memory. That its representationthe
true, impassioned attempt to resurrect it in words and imagescannot wholly succeed
is testimony to the fragility of that memory and to the condition of what is being
remembered, for it is blown away with every gust of wind.

Ever since the end of the Second World War intellectuals have debated whether the
Holocaust is at all representable, what are the motivations behind various representations
of Auschwitz and to what extent such representations constitute an abuse of the historical
truth and memory of the event. It has been said that figures such as Jean Amery, Primo
Levi, and Paul Celan constantly wrote on their experiences so as to be able to (literally)
keep body and soul together, and that finally their resistance broke down, leading them to
suicide. Yet this assertion hardly does justice to these figures or, for that matter, to
many other survivors. Indeed, it seems to me to make a false distinction between those who
write so as to rid themselves of a burden that otherwise would make their existence
impossible and those who feel charged with a moral mission and direct their writing at the
public. I see no reason to privilege one over the other. Writers who tend to be more
inward-looking may well reflect on their personal experiences and question the
understanding of such experiences and their wider implication both by themselves and by
others; they can thereby fulfill also a social and moral function without becoming
necessarily politicized. As for Levi and Amery (and in a different way also Celan), they
stated quite unambiguously that the reason for their writing and the cause of their
increasing despair had to do just as much with the political reality of the post-Holocaust
world, perceived by them as constantly repeating at least some aspects of their own
experiences in Auschwitz, as well as with the manner in which the horrors they had
undergone were represented by artists, intellectuals, and politicians. This is the
important point: it was what happened after the Holocaust, when it became clear to the
survivors that Auschwitz had not been the horror to end all horrors, but only signalled
the beginning of a seemingly endless cycle of similar horrors (to which humanity was
adapting itself with remarkable speed), which caused them such bottomless despair. And it
was the newly emerging trends in representing their experiences in the Holocaust, which
they saw not merely as being unfair to them, but perhaps more important as reflecting some
fascination with extremity and with artificially recreating the most horror-filled
situations so as to be able to observe them from the safety of one's armchair, that made
them realize the extent to which Auschwitz was anything but the end, indeed merely the
beginning of a new age.

. . . whatever we may learn from history, linguistics, psychopathology, political
science, or social anthropology about the conditions which preceded and promoted the death
camps or the behavior of oppressors and victims which obtained within the death camps is
unavailing. All analysis holds us within the normative kingdom of reason and however the
palpable irrationality of the events, the employment of rational analysis is
inappropriate. I do not feel the calm of reason to be obscene, as some critics of the
rational inquiry into the tremendum have described it. It is not obscene for human
beings to try to retain their sanity before an event which boggles sanity. It is a decent
and plausible undertaking. It is simply inappropriate and unavailing. Probative reason,
dispassionate reason have no place in the consideration of the death camps, precisely
because reason possesses a moral vector. To reason, that is, to evaluate, is to employ
discernment and discrimination, and reasoned discrimination entails the presence of a
moral ambiguity and its resolution. There is no possibility of regarding the tremendum as
standing within the parsings of moral judgment. It is not simply that the death camps were
absolutely evil. Such judgments do not help. It is not enough to pronounce them absolutely
evil. Absolute evil is a paradigm. There is little to which we can point in the history of
men and nations which is absolutely evil, although the criterion of that abstraction has
helped moralists to pronounce upon the relative evils of history. . . .

. . . The point of this is to suggest that moral convention, a pragmatic regimen of
norms and regulae of behavior, have authority only so long as the absolute evil of
which they are exempla remains abstract and unrealized. When the absolute evil
comes to be, the sphere of the moral and immoral ceases to be efficacious. . . .

If this analysis is correct, it will be readily understood why I have come to regard
the death camps as a new event, one severed from connection with the traditional
presuppositions of history, psychology, politics, and morality. Anything which we might
have known before the tremendum is rendered conditional by its utteress and
extremity. . . .

I call the death camps the tremendum, for it is the monument of a meaningless
inversion of life, to an orgiastic celebration of death, to a psychosexual and
pathological degeneracy unparalleled and unfathomable to any man bonded to life.

Johann Baptist Metz

Auschwitz concerns us all. Indeed what makes Auschwitz unfathomable is not only the
executioners and their assistants, not only the apotheosis of evil revealed in these, and
not only the silence of God. Unfathomable, and sometimes even more disturbing, is the
silence of men: the silence of all those who looked on or looked away and thereby handed
over this people in its peril of death to an unutterable loneliness. I say this not with
contempt but with grief. Nor am I saying it in order to revive again the dubious notion of
a collective guilt. I am making a plea here for what I would like to call a moral
awareness of tradition. A moral awareness means that we can only mourn history and win
from it standards for our own action when we neither deny the defeats present within it
nor gloss over its catastrophes. Having an awareness of history and attempting to live out
of this awareness means, above all, not evading history's disasters. It also means that
there is at least one authority that we should never reject or despisethe
authority of those who suffer. If this applied anywhere, it applies, in our Christian and
German history, to Auschwitz. The fate of the Jews must be remembered as a moral reality
precisely because it threatens already to become a mere matter of history.

There exists now a huge industry concerned with the representation of the Holocaust and
its periphery, fascism, Nazism, and war, testifying to the morbid attraction to and
fascination with the worst epoch in contemporary history. Our modern, or as some would
have it, postmodern sensibilities seem no longer to be satisfied with simple, unambiguous
images, and the alleged beauty of fascism, for which it itself had laid claim with such
insistence, attracts the makers of filmic images and their viewers alike precisely because
of the knowledge that behind that beauty lay the depths of horror and depravity. Hence
such films as Luchino Visconti's The Damned (1969), Pier Paolo Pasolini's SaloThe
120 Days of Sodom (1975), Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 (1976), Lina Werhnuller's Seven
Beauties (1976), Hans Jurgen Syberberg's Hitler, a Film from Germany (1977),
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lili Marleen (1981), and many more. . . . They do not
tell us much about the human experience under fascism, but rather about our own potential
of being drawn to it. They are very much part of a relatively recent tendency toward
detached, amoral, nonjudgmental, complacent, and yet highly dangerous morbid curiosity
about extremity.

What, then, of the monument in the larger field of Holocaust representations and
discourses? Clearly, the Holocaust monument does not stand in the tradition of the
monument as heroic celebration and figure of triumph. Even in the case of the monument to
the Warsaw Ghetto uprising we face a memorial to suffering, an indictment of crimes
against humanity. Held against the tradition of the legitimizing, identity-nurturing
monument, the Holocaust monument would have to be thought of as inherently a
counter-monument. Yet the traditional critique of the monument as a burying of a memory
and an ossifying of the past has often been voiced against the Holocaust monument as well.
Holocaust monuments have been accused of topolatry, especially those constructed at the
sites of extermination. They have been reproached for betraying memory, a reproach that
holds memory to be primarily internal and subjective and thus incompatible with public
display, museums, or monuments. As a variation on Adorno, who was rightfully wary of the
effects of aestheticizing the unspeakable suffering of the victims, it has been claimed
that to build a monument to the Holocaust was itself a barbaric proposition. No monument
after Auschwitz. And in light of fascist excesses with monumentalization, some have even
gone so far as to suggest that fascist tendencies are inherent in any monument whatsoever.

All these critiques of the medium itself focus on the monument as object, as permanent
reality in stone, as aesthetic sculpture. They do not, however, recognize the public
dimension of the monument, what James Young has described as the dialogical quality of
memorial space. There is no doubt that we would be ill-served by the Holocaust monument as
death mask or by an aestheticization of terror. On the other hand, in the absence of
tombstones to the victims, the monument functions as a substitute site of mourning and
remembrance. How, after all, are we to guarantee the survival of memory if our culture
does not provide memorial spaces that help construct and nurture the collective memory of
the Shoah? Only if we focus on the public function of the monument, embed it in public
discourses of collective memory, can the danger of monumental ossification be avoided. Of
course, public discourse is most intense at the time of planning, designing, and erecting
a new monument. There is no guarantee that the level of dialogic intensity can be
maintained in the long term, and the Holocaust monument may eventually fall victim to the
memory freeze that threatens all monuments.

The great opportunity of the Holocaust monument today lies in its intertextuality and
the fact that it is but one part of our memorial culture. As the traditional boundaries of
the museum, the monument, and historiography have become more fluid, the monument itself
has lost much of its permanence and fixity. The criteria for its success could therefore
be the ways in which it allows for a crossing of boundaries toward other discourses of the
Holocaust, the ways it pushes us toward reading other texts, other stories.

No single monument will ever be able to convey the Holocaust in its entirety. Such a
monument might not even be desirable, just as the Great Book about the Shoah, in Geoffrey
Hartman's words, might "produce a deceptive sense of totality, throwing into the
shadows, even into oblivion, stories, details and unexpected points of view that keep the
intellect active and the memory digging." There is much to be said for keeping
Holocaust monuments and memorials site-specific, for having them reflect local histories,
recalling local memories, making the Final Solution palpable not just by focusing on the
sites of extermination, but on the lives of those murdered in the camps.

At some level, however, the question of the Holocaust as a whole, a totality, will
reassert itself together with the problem of its unspeakability. After we have remembered,
gone through the facts, mourned for the victims, we will still be haunted by that core of
absolute humiliation, degradation, and horror suffered by the victims. How can we
understand when even the witnesses had to say: "I could not believe what I saw with
my own eyes." No matter how fractured by media, by geography, and by subject position
representations of the Holocaust are, ultimately it all comes down to this core:
unimaginable, unspeakable, and unrepresentable horror. Post-Holocaust generations can only
approach that core by mimetic approximation, a mnemonic strategy which recognizes the
event in its otherness and beyond identification or therapeutic empathy, but which
physically innervates some of the horror and the pain in a slow and persistent labor of
remembrance. Such mimetic approximation can only be achieved if we sustain the tension
between the numbing totality of the Holocaust and the stories of the individual victims,
families, and communities. Exclusive focus on the first may lead to the numbing
abstraction of statistics and the repression of what these statistics mean; exclusive
focus on the second may provide facile cathartic empathy and forget the frightening
conclusion that the Holocaust as a historical event resulted, as Adi Ophir put it, from an
exceptional combination of normal processes. The ultimate success of a Holocaust monument
would be to trigger such a mimetic approximation, but it can achieve that goal only in
conjunction with other related discourses operating in the head of the spectator and the
public sphere.

Within Holocaust studies broadly defined, two approaches to the question of genocide
have dominated, which I will call realist and antirealist. By realist I mean both an
epistemological claim that the Holocaust is knowable and a representational claim that
this knowledge can be translated into a familiar mimetic universe. The realist approach
has characterize the dominant scholarly methodology, that of historians and others who
assert the necessity of considering the Holocaust according to "scientific"
procedures and inscribing the events within continuous historical narratives. By
antirealist I mean both a claim that the Holocaust is not knowable or would be knowable
only under radically new regimes of knowledge and that it cannot be captured in
traditional representational schemata. The antirealist approach has flourished in more
popular discourses, in some survivor testimony and pronouncements, and in many literary,
aesthetic, and philosophical considerations of the "uniqueness" of the Shoah.
This tendency removes the Holocaust from standard historical, cultural, or
autobiographical narratives and situates it as a sublime, unapproachable object beyond
discourse and knowledge. In addition to constituting an implicit theory of epistemology
and representation, each of these approaches also implies a particular conception of the
relationship between the everyday and the extreme, with the realists tending to collapse
the two poles or, more often, to situate them on a continuum and the antirealists
installing an unbridgeable rupture between the ordinary and the extraordinary.

Emblematic of what I am calling here the realist tendency would be Hannah Arendts
notion of the "banality of evil"which sought to capture "the essence
of Nazi genocide in the ordinary figure of the bureaucratand her suggestion that
"evil is never 'radical,' that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither
depth nor any demonic dimension." Extremity here is not something that breaks with
the ordinary dimensions of the modern world but exists on a continuum with it. As scholars
committed to empirical historical and social scientific methodologies, both Christopher
Browning, with his notion of "ordinary men," and Daniel Goldhagen, with
his provocative indictment of "ordinary Germans," answer to Michael Marrus's
plea for a "normalization" of historical scholarship in the treatment of the
Holocaust. Even in Goldhagen's case, seemingly radical evil is situated within an
explainable tradition and everyday life-world. Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman's thesis on the
"modernity" of the genocide, which is framed as an indictment of the blind spots
of a hegemonic sociology, ultimately argues that genocide is indeed explainable with
reference to the intersection of very ordinary sociological structures of the modern
world. These positions are all realist in that in calling on concepts such as
"banality," "ordinariness," "detached, professional"
science, and "modernity," they also suggest that the phenomena they describe
(whose horror is in no way minimized by them) may be apprehended and comprehended
according to already established techniques of representation and analysis.

Proponents of the antirealist tendency are probably more well known among
nonspecialists of the Holocaust and, to a certain extent, shape the dominant popular
understanding of the events through their access to the resources of the public sphere.
They include such significant figures as Elie Wiesel, who has assiduously defended the
uniqueness of the destruction of European Jewry and claimed that "Auschwitz cannot be
explained nor can it be visualized. . . . [T]he Holocaust transcends history"; Claude
Lanzmann, who asserts that his film Shoah forgoes any attempt to represent the
Holocaust and declares any attempt to understand the events "obscene"; Arthur
Cohen, who gives a theological cast to the discourse with his concept of the
"tremendum," a "holocaustal caesura" that renders "[t]hinking and
the death camps . . . incommensurable"; and Jean-Francois Lyotard, who replaces
realism with notions of sublimity and the incommensurability of the "differend."
This discourse of "transcendence," "obscenity," "tremendum,"
and irresolvable "differend" detaches the extreme from the everyday and seeks to
disable established modes of representation and understanding.

. . . the example given by the Nazi regime as to the ability of a modern state to
destroy human lives with the same techniques used by modern industry, employing the
bureaucratic apparatus readily available to any modern state, is one that can hardly be
ignored. Because although history may not repeat itself, it is rare that anything
introduced to human history is not used again. Whether the Holocaust was unique or not in
terms of its precedents is one question; whether it will remain so is quite another.

Jean Améry

. . . since being a Jew not only means that I
bear within me a catastrophe that occurred yesterday and cannot be ruled out for tomorrow,
it isbeyond being a dutyalso fear. Every morning when I get up I can
read the Auschwitz number on my forearm, something that touches the deepest and most
closely intertwined roots of my existence; indeed I am not even sure if this is not my
entire existence. Then I feel approximately as I did back then when I got a taste of the
first blow from a policeman's fist. Every day anew I lose my trust in the world.

Saul Friedlander

If Benjamin's view of historical redemption implies the construction of meaning, we may
be confronted with an insoluble paradox when facing the extermination of the Jews of
Europe: on the one hand, the most diverse modes of evocation of the events abound; on the
other hand, both in the representations of this past as well as in its interpretation, we
are facing dilemmas which paralyze our "weak redeeming powers." One may wonder,
though, whether such a situation is not appropriate. In the last part of Claude Lanzmann's
film Shoah, the structure of the narration seems to become ever looser, as if
disintegrating. When, in the end, a leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising speaks, nothing
is left of the rhetoric of heroism, of symbolic redemption; there is only bitterness at
heart. The inability to say, the apparent pathology of obsessive recall, the seemingly
simplistic refusal of historiographical closure may ultimately be the only self-evident
sequels of an unmasterable past.

from Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Indiana UP,
1993)

Elie Wiesel

. . . Do we want to understand? There is no longer anything to understand. Do we want
to know? There is nothing to know anymore. It is not by playing with words and the dead
that we will understand and know. Quite the contrary. As the ancients said: "Those
who know do not speak; those who speak do not know."

But we prefer to speak and to judge. We wish to be strong and invulnerable. The lesson
of the holocaustif there is anyis that our strength is only illusory, and that
in each of us is a victim who is afraid, who is cold, who is hungry. Who is also ashamed.

The Talmud teaches man never to judge his friend until he has been in his place. But,
for the world, the Jews are not friends. They have never been. Because they had no friends
they are dead.

So, learn to be silent.

from "A Plea for the Dead"

Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi

[T]he present discussion takes place against a widespread suspicion of acts
of the imagination that defy proprietary boundaries. It is a suspicion shared
not only by the self-appointed guardians of Jewish memory and ‘le droit de
parole,’but also by many of those more dispassionate theorists
engaged in the debate on questions of representation. Conflicting theories of
historiography, and of the interface between fact and fiction in an age of
infinite mechanical (and electronic) reproduction, have yielded a highly-charged
polemical field, roughly divided between those who deny the value of any
representation that does not confront its audience with raw suffering and
unmediated evil agency, and those who countenance what I would call a more
liberated and mediated engagement with history.

The argument for an ongoing experiential, or subjectivized, encounter
with the Holocaust has been described by Geoffrey Hartman as a strategy for
lowering our media-saturated, desensitized threshold of pain. Bombarded as we
are by daily scenes of atrocity, by images that, recycled and routinized, become
icons of our own numbness, we seek, he says, to "cut’ ourselves, like
psychotics who ascertain in this way that they exist. As if only a personal or
historical trauma (I bleed, therefore I am) would bond us to life."As
touchstone of our honesty, this ‘cut’ posits survivor testimony as the most
direct encounter that any bystander to history can have with the ‘Event,’
documentary as the truest form of historiography and strict realism as the
discipline for anyone of fictive mind.

This impulse to stay inside of or as close as possible to the site of trauma
comes as response not only to the psychic numbing caused by over-exposure to
images of horror but also to the pervasive sense of art as a form of betrayal.
Whether we understand the mimetic impulse to be an adult version of child’s
play or "make-believe," or to be an act of spiritual elevation that
has no place in the pitiless netherworld of Auschwitz, the imagination in any
but its most constrained forms appears to many as a desecrating agent. The
language itself is telling, entering a world of sacred discourse means,
invariably, submitting to carefully drawn and guarded boundaries. There may be
an overlap here between the historian’s positivistic and the theologian’s
doctrinal insistence on proximity to the source as measure of authenticity. In
any case, the theological lexicon that has evolved around this subject hardly
questions its own preoccupation with limits.

The boundaries are set by the fear of betrayal or danger of trespass.
Starting in the 1950s, each boundary crossed provoked a scandal in the public
sphere. It is easy to compile a list of transgressive events, with different
resonances in different cultures. Such a list could include, in America, the
dramatization of Anne Frank’s Diary (1955); Philip Roth’s short story,
"Eli the Fanatic" (1959), E. L. Wallant’s novel, The Pawnbroker (1961)
and the movie based on it; Gerald Green’s TV Holocaust series (1978-9),
D. M. Thomas’ novel, The White Hotel (1981), Art Spiegelman’s
comic-book Maus I and II (1986, 1991); Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s
List (1993) and, most recently, Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1998).
The Diary was deemed, by potential producers, as too negative, too
painful for contemporary audiences, who would have to confront a young girl on
stage whom they knew had already been consigned, offstage, to death in a
concentration camp; the survivor in Roth’s story was considered to be too
Jewish, the character in Wallant’s novel and the film based on it was too
Christian, the inmates’ uniforms in Green’s television series were too
starched, D. M. Thomas’s novel was too sexy, Maus was too
daring, Schindler’s List, too positive, Life is Beautiful, too hopeful.The impresarios of these judgments have included embarrassed readers or
viewers, public defenders of the faith as well as cultural critics. If, then, in
the 1950s the problem was that the reenacted event was too depressing, in the
1990s the problem is that it is too hopeful. Each of these has a different story
to tell and different reasons for being perceived by some as scandalous and by
others as legitimately challenging conventional wisdom or social consensus. But
they all have one thing in common: they make a daring point about human nature,
about the nature of evil or suffering—and they do so by transgressing some
perceived boundary in their mode of interpretation or in their arrogation of ‘the
right to speak."

Limits are imposed from two quarters from those who invoke the likes of David
Irving as their point of departure and from those who invoke T. W. Adorno as
theirs. The first group attempts to guard against the distortions and abuses of
history that are committed under the guise of historical method, the second
attempts to protect historical facts from the "barbaric" mitigations
of poetry. Both camps posit that, outside the consensual bounds of the
truth-telling community there is only "denial." In this mindset,
poetic license is, potentially, a form of mendacity as harmful as falsification
of the historical record, the siege mentality that prevails in these quarters
regards the pernicious effacement of reality as commensurate with the
self-conscious editing of reality in acts of imagination that, presumably, allow
the pleasure principle to upstage the pain principle.

Those who are so anxious to draw lines are, then, essentially permitting the
‘Holocaust deniers’ to define the boundaries. What Hartman calls
"realistic purism" is the argument that "art is simply less
faithful than history in holding the line against a feared recession of
reality. [Thus,] most historians . .. see positivistic accuracy as the last
remaining safeguard against relativism and revisionism." This is an
argument that has come from all quarters, from philosophers and literary critics
as well as historians. Inveighing against poetry out of a profound respect for
its office, Berel Lang writes that, because "poetic reference to specific
historical settings becomes increasingly attenuated as the text is more fully
realized poetically," only "documentary and other forms of historical
writing" fulfill the ethical and epistemological imperatives of Holocaust
representation.

Strictures that are never invoked in regard to other historical events are
invoked here to protect the viewer/reader from some presumed ignorance, as if
the historical record were the sacred trust of the poet, and not her raw
material. As if narrative boundaries that historians themselves no longer
embrace must constrain the imagination of anyone else who draws near to the
fire. Ernst Van Alphen clarifies the ‘ban’ on imaginative representations of
the Holocaust by demonstrating that, particularly where commemorative art is
concerned, abstract art is acceptable because it respects, at least
implicitly, the "sublime unrepresentability" of the Holocaust; it does
not presume to enter into the mimetic space, which must be, by these lights,
inhabited primarily by a documentary, historically-accountable, idiom.

From The Yale Journal of Criticism (2001)

Who Owns Auschwitz?
by Imre Kertész
Translated by John MacKay

Holocaust survivors will have to face the facts: as they grow weaker with
age, Auschwitz is slipping out of their hands. But to whom will it belong?
Obviously, to the next generation, and to the one after that—as long as they
continue to lay claim to it, of course.

There is something shockingly ambiguous about the jealous way in which
survivors insist on their exclusive rights to the Holocaust as intellectual
property as though they’d come into possession of some great and unique
secret, as though they were protecting some unheard-of treasure from decay and
(especially) from willful damage. Only they are able to guard it from
decay, through the strength of their memory. But how are they to respond to the
damage wrought by others, to the Holocaust’s appropriation by others, to all
the falsifications and sundry manipulations, and above all to that most powerful
of enemies, the passage of time itself? Furtive glances cling to every line of
every book on the Holocaust, to every foot of every film where the Holocaust is
mentioned. Is the representation plausible, the history exact? Did we really say
that, feel that way? Is that really where the latrine stood, in precisely that
corner of the barracks? Were the roll-calls, the hunger, the selections of
victims really like that? And so on, and so on... But why are we so keenly
interested in all the embarrassing and painful details, rather than just trying
to forget them all as soon as possible? It seems that, with the dying-away of
the living sensation of the Holocaust, all the unimaginable pain and sorrow live
on as a single, unified value—a value to which one not only clings more
strongly than to any other, but which one will also see generally recognized and
accepted.

And herein lies the ambiguity. For the Holocaust to become with time a real
part of European (or at least western European) public consciousness, the price
inevitably extracted in exchange for public notoriety had to be paid. Thus we
immediately got a stylization of the Holocaust, a stylization which has by now
grown to nearly unbearable dimensions. The word "Holocaust" is already
a stylization, an affected abstraction from more brutal-sounding terms like
"extermination camp" or "Final Solution." Nor should it come
as any surprise, as more and more is said about the Holocaust, that its reality—the
day to day reality of human extermination—increasingly slips away, out of the
realm of the imaginable. In my Diary From the Galleys, I found myself
compelled to write: "The concentration camp is imaginable only and
exclusively as literature, never as reality (Not even—or rather, least of all—when
we have directly experienced it.)"The drive to survive makes us
accustomed to lying as long as possible about the murderous reality in which we
are forced to hold our own, while the drive to remember seduces us into sneaking
a certain complacent satisfaction into our reminiscences: the balsam of
self-pity, the martyr’s self-glorification. And as long as we let ourselves
float on the lukewarm waves of belated solidarity (or the appearance of
solidarity), we fail to hear the real question, always posed with trepidation
but still audible, behind the phrases of the official eulogies, how should the
world free itself from Auschwitz, from the burden of the Holocaust?

I don’t think that this question is inevitably posed on the basis of
dishonest motives. Rather, it expresses a natural longing, and the survivors,
indeed, long for nothing else. Nonetheless, the decades have taught me that the
only passable route to liberation leads us through memory. But there are various
ways of remembering. The artist hopes that, through a precise description,
leading him once more along the pathways of death, he will finally break through
to the noblest kind of liberation, to a catharsis in which he can perhaps allow
his reader to partake as well. But how many such works have come into being
during the last century? I can count on ten fingers the number of writers who
have produced truly great literature of world importance out of the experience
of the Holocaust. We seldom meet with the likes of a Paul Celan, a Tadeusz
Borowski, a Primo Levi, a Jean Améry, a Ruth Klüger, a Claude Lanzmann, or a
Miklós Radóti.

More and more often, the Holocaust is stolen from its guardians and made into
cheap consumer goods. Or else it is institutionalized, and around it is built a
moral-political ritual, complete with a new and often phony language. Certain
words come to be compelled by public discourse, and almost automatically set off
the Holocaust-reflex in the listener or the reader. In every way possible and
impossible, the Holocaust is rendered alien to human beings. The survivor is
taught how he has to think about what he has experienced, regardless of whether
or to what extent this "thinking-about" is consistent with his real
experiences. The authentic witness is or will soon be perceived as being in the
way, and will have to be shoved aside like the obstacle he is. The words of
Améry prove their truth: "We, the victims, will appear as the truly
incorrigible, irreconcilable ones, as the anti-historical reactionaries in the
exact sense of the word, and in the end it will seem like a technical mishap
that some of us still survived."

A Holocaust conformism has arisen, along with a Holocaust sentimentalism, a
Holocaust canon, and a system of Holocaust taboos together with the ceremonial
discourse that goes with it; Holocaust products for Holocaust consumers have
been developed. Auschwitz-lies have appeared, and the figure of the Auschwitz
con-man has come into being. Over the course of time we have come to know of one
Holocaust guru, inundated with prizes for his achievements in literature and
human rights, who gave first-hand reports of his indescribable experiences as a
three- or four-year-old in the Majdanek extermination camp—until it was
determined that between 1941 and 1945 he hadn’t left his bourgeois Swiss
family’s house, except perhaps to take a healthy stroll or sitting in his baby
carriage.Meanwhile, we dwell in the midst of Spielberg’s saurian
kitsch and with the absurd chatter emerging from the fruitless discussions over
the Berlin Holocaust monument. The time will come when Berliners—along with
foreigners who end up in Berlin, of course (above all, I imagine groups of
assiduous Japanese tourists)—will stroll, sunk in peripatetic reflection and
surrounded by the roar of Berlin traffic, through the Holocaust Park, complete
with playground, while Spielberg’s 48, 239th interview-partner
whispers—or howls—his own individual story of suffering in their ears. (When
I imagine the kinds of games that might be played in this Holocaust playground
(conceived, according to an interpretation offered several months ago in the
pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, as "a gift from the
murdered Jewish children to their unknown playmates in Berlin"), I think
immediately (and helplessly: a result of how my stock of associations was
spoiled in Auschwitz, no doubt) of the "Boger swing," a device made
famous during the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, and upon which its builder, the
inventive SS Unterscharführer Boger, would physically strap his victims
head-down, thus turning their exposed backsides into playthings for and his
sadistic mania.)

Yes, the survivors watch helplessly as their only real possessions are done
away with: authentic experiences. I know that many will not agree with me when I
apply the term "kitsch" to Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. It
is said that Spielberg has in fact done a great service, considering that his
film lured millions into the movie theaters, including many who otherwise would
never have been interested in the subject of the Holocaust. That might be true.
But why should I,as a Holocaust survivor and as one in possession of a
broader experience of terror, be pleased when more and more people see these
experiences produced on the big screen—and falsified at that? It is obvious
that the American Spielberg, who incidentally wasn’t even born until after the
war, has and can have no idea of the authentic reality of a Nazi concentration camp. Why, then, does he struggle so hard to make his representation of a world he does
not know seem authentic in every detail? The most important message of this black-and-white film comes, I think, at
the end, with the appearance in color of a triumphant crowd of people. But I also regard as kitsch any representation of
the Holocaust that fails to imply the wide-ranging ethical consequences of Auschwitz, and from which the PERSON in
capital letters (and with it the idea of the Human as such) emerges from the camps healthy and unharmed. If this were
really possible, we wouldn't still be talking about the Holocaust, or at any rate would speak about it as we might
discuss some event of which we have only a distant historical memory, like, say, the Battle of El-Alamein. I regard as
kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic
connection between our own deformed mode of life (whether in the private sphere or on the level of "civilization" as
such) and the very possibility of the Holocaust. Here I have in mind those representations that seek to establish the
Holocaust once and for all as something foreign to human nature; that seek to drive the Holocaust out of the realm of
human experience. I would also use the term kitsch to describe those works where Auschwitz is regarded as simply a
matter concerning Germans and Jews, and thereby reduced to something like the fatal incompatibility of two groups;
when the political and psychological anatomy of modern totalitarianism more generally is disregarded; when Auschwitz
is not seen as a universal experience, but reduced to whatever immediately "hits the eye." Apart from this, of course, I
regard anything that is kitsch, as kitsch.

Perhaps I haven't mentioned that I have been speaking from the outset about a film, about Roberto Benigni's
Life is
Beautiful. In Budapest, where I'm writing these lines, the film hasn't (yet?) been shown. And if it does get shown at
some time in the future, it certainly won't give rise to the kinds of discussion that I've heard it has provoked in western
Europe. Here the Holocaust is differently not-talked-about, differently talked-about (on those occasions when it's not
possible to avoid talking about it) than in western Europe. Here the Holocaust has been a "touchy subject," so to
speak, ever since the end of the Second World War, a subject shielded from the "brutal" process of truth-finding by
defensive walls of taboo and euphemism.

So you might say that I saw the film with an innocent eye (on videocassette). I haven't read the criticism and don't
know the specific reproaches leveled against the film, and--truth to tell--I can't well imagine what it is in the film that has
provoked such debate. I suppose that once again a choir of Holocaust puritans, Holocaust dogmatists and Holocaust
usurpers is being heard, asking: "Can, should the Holocaust be treated in this way?" But what is "this way," more
precisely considered? Those who have seen the film (or better: not seen it) with the ideological
blinders on will reply: "with so much humor, and using the devices of comedy"--and they won't have understood a word,
not one single scene of the film.

Above all, they fail to see that Benigni's central idea isn't comic at all, but tragic. It is true that this idea, along with the
central character of Guido, develops only very slowly. During the first 20 or 30 minutes, we feel as though we've been
transferred onto the set of some old-fashioned burlesque. Only later do we understand how organically this apparently
impossible introduction fits into the dramatic structure not only of the film, but of life itself. Even as one gradually
comes to find the protagonist's slapstick interludes unbearable, the magician slowly emerges from behind the clown's
mask. He lifts the wand, and from then on every word, every moment of the film is inspired. In the information packet
provided with the videocassette, I read that the filmmakers paid careful attention to the way they represented the daily
life of the camp, to the authenticity of the scenery, props and so on. Fortunately, in this they did not succeed.
Authenticity lies, admittedly, in details, but not necessarily in material details. The gateway into the camp in
Life is Beautiful resembles the entrance into the actual Birkenau to about the same extent that the battleship in Fellini's
And the Ship Sails On [E la nave va, 1983] resembles a real flagship of a real Austro-Hungarian admiral. But the point here
lies in something totally different: the spirit, the soul of Life is Beautiful is authentic, and it moves us with the power of
the oldest kind of magic, the magic of fairy tales.

At first sight, this fairy tale looks pretty awkward on paper. Guido deceives his four-year-old son Giosue into thinking
that Auschwitz is just a game. Participants in the game receive points for successfully overcoming difficulties, and the
winner will receive a "real tank." But does not this device of the "game" correspond in an essential way to the lived
reality of Auschwitz? One could smell the stench of burning human flesh, but still did not want to believe that all of this
could be true. One would rather find some notion that might tempt one to survive, and a "real tank" is, for a child,
precisely this kind of seductive promise.

There is one scene in the film that will no doubt generate a good deal of discussion. I am thinking of the moment when
the protagonist Guido takes on the interpreter's role and "translates" into Italian an SS man's directives (informing the
prisoners of the camp's rules of order) for the inhabitants of the barracks, including above all his own son. What this
scene contains cannot be described in rational language, and says everything there is to say about the absurdity of
that atrocious world, and about those who stood in opposition to the madness, unbroken in their spiritual strength.
There is never any gigantism here, no sentimental or agonizing lingering over details, no red arrows
shot demonstratively across a gray background. Everything is so clear and simple, so immediate and touching, that
tears well up in one's eyes. The film's dramatic structure operates with the simple precision of good tragedy. Guido
must die, and he must die at exactly the moment he dies and in exactly the way he dies. Before his death--and here
we learn just how precious and beautiful life is for him--he performs a few Chaplinesque antics in order to give faith and
strength to the boy after the latter has crawled out of his hiding place. That we don't see Guido's death when it comes
says much about the film's unerring taste, its faultless style. But the swift, cracking report of the machine gun also has
its dramatic function, and contains an important and shattering message. At the end, the boy sees his "prize" rolling
toward him--the "real tank." But here, sadness over the ruined "game" overwhelms the story. We now understand that,
somewhere else, the "game" would be called civilization, humanity, freedom--everything that humans ever regarded as
valuable. And when the boy, reunited with his mother and suspended in her arms, cries out "we won!" his words come
to resemble, through the power of this moment, an elegy shot through with grief.

I notice that Benigni, the creator of the film, was born in 1952. He is the representative of a new generation that is
wrestling with the ghost of Auschwitz, and has the courage (and also the strength) to lay claim to this sad inheritance.

Imre Kertész was born in 1929 into a Jewish family in Budapest. In 1944, at the age of 15, he was deported first to
Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald. Since 1953, Kertész has been a professional writer, but a proscription placed upon
his writing by Hungary's communist government forced him to make his living as a translator of German (his
translations of Freud, Nietzsche, Canetti, and Wittgenstein are well known in Hungary). He first attracted wide attention
in 1975 with his semi-autobiographical novel Fateless (which appeared in English in 1992), and since that time his work
has been widely translated and commented upon throughout Europe. An English translation of his
Kaddish for a Child Not Born appeared in 1997. [. . . .]

The dead of Auschwitz should have brought upon us a total transformation; nothing
should have been allowed to remain as it was, neither among our people nor in our
churches. Above all, not in the churches.